It’s official: Tim Cook named 2015 as “the year of Apple Pay.” Apple’s flagship mobile payment platform is off to a running start in the U.S., with support for an impressive number of banking partners and retail stores that’s practically growing by the day. And iPhone users are rampantly using it—Whole Foods Market has seen mobile payments increase by more than 400 percent since Apple Pay launched in October 2014.

However much you love your Mac, I’m willing to bet there’s at least one hardware feature you want to add to it—and quite possibly one or two that you wouldn’t mind losing. On my trusty old 2008 MacBook Pro, for example, I wish I had a second video-out port for hooking up a third display, and I could live without the Ethernet port. You might think picking and chosing your features like this is a pipe dream, but in a sense it’s not a million miles away from what Apple used to offer with its PowerBooks.

When I got my PowerBook 1400c, it came with a (6×!) CD-ROM drive, which was obviously great for browsing CD-ROMs (Myst! Encarta! *cough* Duke Nukem!) and listening to music.

BitTorrent Sync is free software, available for all major platforms, that keeps folders in sync across your devices and enables you to share them securely with other people. That may sound suspiciously like Dropbox, iCloud Drive, and dozens of other cloud storage services—and indeed, the end result is much the same. The big difference is that BitTorrent Sync uses peer-to-peer networking rather than relying on cloud servers.

This approach has several significant advantages. You can have as much storage as you like (limited only by your local disk space) without paying a penny, and because your files are never stored in the cloud, no one else can access them without your explicit permission.

It’s no secret that Apple drives Internet traffic. This is why every new smartphone is hailed as an iPhone killer, every new laptop a MacBook killer and every new pair of socks an iPod socks killer. But you hate to see this old trick used by sites you respect.

The gold standard for password vaults on the Mac is 1Password. Now in its fifth major release, 1Password has matured along with its userbase. One of its most stalwart longtime competitors, LastPass, has had an iOS version, but OS X customers have had to work through browser plug-ins or its website, putting it at a disadvantage.

The release of the free LastPass for Mac puts the two popular secrets-protection packages head to head. And LastPass comes out reasonably well in aspects of the comparison: the two apps carve out different spaces, which will vary in importance by users’ specific security preferences and access needs. But in most respects, LastPass feels unfinished and clunky—a work in progress that works, but needs more work. The Mac version is free. A $12-per-year subscription adds mobile app synchronization, hardware-based and biometric two-factor login support, and a family-based secure password sharing option.

With the Apple Watch scheduled for an April release, is there still a place in the market for another smartwatch? Garmin's latest entry into the field, the Vivosmart, looks to differentiate itself from Apple's offering by being a fitness tracker with smartphone features, rather than a smartwatch that also happens to track your activity.

The $170 Vivosmart is first and foremost a fitness tracker, keeping tabs on your activity by covering the number of steps you take, steps remaining to your daily goal, distance covered, calories burned and time spent inactive—more on that later. (A separate heart monitor can provide additional metrics.)

OS X’s clipboard has always been a transient storage place, intended to hold whatever you copy or cut just long enough to paste it somewhere else. Once you copy something else, that new snippet overwrites whatever’s already on your clipboard. And if you restart your Mac, you lose whatever was on the clipboard beforehand.

But what if you had something important on the clipboard but forgot to paste it, and then copied something else? What if you want to copy several things and then paste each of them multiple times? What if you want to preserve what’s on your clipboard past a restart? And what if you copied something in one format but want to paste it in a different format—for example, removing text formatting or changing capitalization? You need a clipboard manager.

I’ve said it countless times: it’s not a question of if you will lose data, but when. Media, such as hard drives, eventually fails. Or you can make the kind of mistake that results in deleted folders or erased disks. And files can simply get corrupted. There are two things you need to do to ensure you don’t lose data: back up your files regularly, and use software to diagnose and correct problems before they become serious.

Bacon saver

Since 1998, Alsoft’s DiskWarrior has been the go-to tool for fixing disk corruption on Macs. It’s been eight years since the last update to DiskWarrior. At the time, I reviewed DiskWarrior 4 and gave it the highest rating, five mice. It has saved my data, and fixed hard drive issues, many times over the years.

The introduction of the Macintosh back in 1984 helped release us from the bondage of the command-line interface. So, it seems ironic that there’s a relatively new category of Mac productivity apps that lets us control our Macs from the keyboard. Quicksilver was one of the first of these utilities, and I was a big fan. But when developer support fragmented, other apps like Launchbar and even Apple’s own Spotlight moved in to stake a claim. I’ve tried all of them and, while all have their merits, I eventually landed on Alfred by Running With Crayons and haven’t looked back.

QuickBooks Online Self-Employed is a thinned-down version of QuickBooks Online with a very specific focus: Sole proprietors and small business owners who mix business and personal accounts, who pay quarterly taxes, and who need to do quick triage on business and personal income and expenses. QuickBooks Online Self-Employed performs its magic with the combination of a Web app and an iOS app and makes it easy to quickly separate your business and personal expenses.

QuickBooks Online Self-Employed is small business focused, which is to say that it’s aimed at business owners who are sole proprietors or LLC owners without partners, and who write off business expenses using a Schedule C when filing their personal taxes. The assumption on Intuit’s part is that the people who own these types of businesses often have a commingling of business and personal credit card and bank accounts and that it is often difficult using traditional accounting applications to quickly and easily separate business expenses from personal expenses.

Popular email client Mail Pilot treats each message as a task to be checked off your to-do list. Mail Pilot 2, launching Thursday for iPhone and iPad, aims to further increase your productivity with a radically redesigned interface. But in the version we tested, several lingering rough edges work against those ambitions.

Mail Pilot 2 ditches its predecessor’s abundant icons for quick gestures. Swipe left, or tap the check button, to mark a message as completed. Swipe right to save it for later, using the length of your swipe to control how many days it’ll be postponed. Tap and hold to delete, complete, postpone, or organize a message by flicking it toward one of the four sides of the screen. I found the new interface useful and intuitive, and appreciated the friendly tutorials that pop up the first time you encounter any new part of the app.

The BrydgeAir keyboard is unlike any iPad accessory I’ve used before. With integrated speakers underneath a backlit keyboard with a 180-degree hinge, it makes your iPad feel like a laptop, and that’s the entire point.

In a market of nearly identical iPad keyboards that offer the same core features, Brydge is trying to set itself apart. After spending the last week with its solution for the iPad Air 2, I’d say it does just that.

Familiar, yet different

As with nearly all iPad keyboards, the Brydge is equipped with the standard Mac keyboard layout. The keys are a bit smaller than those found on the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover, and appear to have the same amount of travel, yet offer less resistance. In my use, less resistance translated into an adjustment period of accidentally entering letters when I merely intended to rest my fingers on keys. After using the keyboard for a few hours, I was acclimated and typing relatively error free.

I love to bake, but it can be such a finicky process. Add too much baking soda? Your cookies are ruined. Try to substitute regular milk for buttermilk? Disaster. It doesn’t allow for interpretation the same way cooking does. That’s why Drop’s new iPad-connected scale is so compelling: It simplifies even complicated recipes down to baby steps, no measuring required.

I already bring my iPad into the kitchen to replace my recipe collection and act as my spirit cooking guide. Setting up Drop’s $100 Bluetooth scale and companion app just makes my tablet even more useful.

The Drop Kitchen companion app tells you exactly what you need to have on hand before you get started.

At the end of 2006, the cell phone landscape was awash with devices that filled specific wants and needs. If you wanted the coolest way to make calls, you got the RAZR. If you needed to email colleagues on the go, you bought a BlackBerry. If you were constantly texting your friends during study hall, there was the Sidekick.

Some had keyboards, some flipped, some gave us access to the “baby Internet,” some had cameras. Walking into a Verizon or AT&T store was an exercise in exhaustion, with rows of phones running the gamut of designs. There were no real unifying elements, even as cellphones were clearly heading in a smarter, richer direction. No one was able to put it all together until Steve Jobs pulled the iPhone out of his pocket.

More than two years after its initial public release, BitTorrent Sync has been updated to version 2.0 and dropped its “beta” designation. Based on the peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol, it enables users to securely sync folders among their own devices and share them with other users, without relying on cloud servers like Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, and Apple’s iCloud Drive.

Although the software remains free, version 2.0 adds an optional Pro tier—aimed primarily at business users—with extra convenience features and access controls, for $40 per user per year (with volume discounts for more than five licenses). All users of BitTorrent Sync 2.0 get 30 days of free access to the Pro features.

BitTorrent Sync is free software, available for all major platforms, that keeps folders in sync across your devices and enables you to share them securely with other people. That may sound suspiciously like Dropbox, iCloud Drive, and dozens of other cloud storage services—and indeed, the end result is much the same. The big difference is that BitTorrent Sync uses peer-to-peer networking rather than relying on cloud servers.

This approach has several significant advantages. You can have as much storage as you like (limited only by your local disk space) without paying a penny, and because your files are never stored in the cloud, no one else can access them without your explicit permission.

It’s impossible to truly know how you’ll take to a device until you live with it for a while. That might be true for all gadgets—including smartphones—but especially so with wearables, which might be strapped to your wrist or affixed to clothing all day and night. It might function, but is it comfortable? Fashionable? Spending a couple minutes with a demo unit at a store isn’t the same as donning it for a full workday, taking it to the gym, and sleeping in your own bed with it.

Finding the right wearable can be a pricey endeavor. I learned that tiny Fitbit trackers probably aren’t for me when I “lost” one for several months—and later found it safely nestled in a rarely worn pair of jeans. My wife similarly hasn’t taken to easily overlooked clip-on fitness trackers: she just wants something that’s relatively inconspicuous, but won’t be regularly forgotten on her nightstand.

However much you love your Mac, I’m willing to bet there’s at least one hardware feature you want to add to it—and quite possibly one or two that you wouldn’t mind losing. On my trusty old 2008 MacBook Pro, for example, I wish I had a second video-out port for hooking up a third display, and I could live without the Ethernet port. You might think picking and chosing your features like this is a pipe dream, but in a sense it’s not a million miles away from what Apple used to offer with its PowerBooks.

When I got my PowerBook 1400c, it came with a (6×!) CD-ROM drive, which was obviously great for browsing CD-ROMs (Myst! Encarta! *cough* Duke Nukem!) and listening to music.

The world waits with baited breath for more details about the Apple Watch, which should be revealed at a special event in San Francisco next Monday. But Tim Cook is just as anxious as we are to get this party started, and he teased some details in a trip to Germany.

If you’re dying to get your hands on an early version of Photos for Mac, Apple just released the first public beta of Yosemite 10.10.3.

The brand new iCloud-based Photos app is 10.10.3’s biggest new feature, replacing both Aperture and iPhoto. The upgrade also includes the widely discussed diverse emojis and easier login for Google users with two-factor authentication turned on. To install the public beta, you need to be a registered beta user. Then click on over to the Mac App Store’s Updates icon, where the 10.10.3 beta will be ready to download.

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OS XThe 11 Mac games you need to play from February 2015Mon, 02 Mar 2015 04:00:00 -0800Andrew HaywardAndrew HaywardThese games will keep you playing well into March (and beyond)

February might be the shortest month of the year, but new and interesting Mac games haven’t been in short supply. Our latest roundup has massive strategy affairs, scrappy and endearing indie games, and even a couple of Early Access releases aiming to earn your affection (and dollars) before they’re properly released down the line.

BitTorrent Sync is free software, available for all major platforms, that keeps folders in sync across your devices and enables you to share them securely with other people. That may sound suspiciously like Dropbox, iCloud Drive, and dozens of other cloud storage services—and indeed, the end result is much the same. The big difference is that BitTorrent Sync uses peer-to-peer networking rather than relying on cloud servers.

This approach has several significant advantages. You can have as much storage as you like (limited only by your local disk space) without paying a penny, and because your files are never stored in the cloud, no one else can access them without your explicit permission.

In our last episode of Private I, I explained the basics of public-key (PK) cryptography, a way to scramble messages in a way that only someone possessing a particular key can decrypt, without that key ever having to be publicly disclosed or shared. It’s an effective system that has no known theoretical exploits, and currently deployed implementations are considered robust.

And to recap: The clever bit with the public-key approach is that you have two complementary keys, one public and one private. The public key can be freely distributed. Anything encrypted by someone else with the public key can only be decrypted by having access to the corresponding private key. And a private key can be used to “sign” a string of text or a document to prove mathematically that only the private key’s possessor could have signed it.

Playlists are one of the best, and most creative ways to organize music in iTunes, and to listen to music on your iOS devices. But sometimes, it can be hard to figure out how to make complex playlists. In this week’s column, I look at three questions about playlists, both standard and smart. And I also look at an issue where album art, for some albums, changes on iOS devices.

Playing multiple playlists in order

Q: Is there a way to play several playlists in sequence? Placing them in a folder doesn’t retain the song order.

I can think of two ways you can play several playlists in order. The first involves using regular playlists, and the second uses a smart playlist to combine several regular playlists.

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OS XAudioDesign a sharp typographic logo, even if all you have is TextEditThu, 26 Feb 2015 03:50:00 -0800Lesa SniderLesa Snider

Logos are notoriously difficult (and costly) to design, yet they’re mission critical for any business. Instead of using graphics, try a typographic approach instead. Typographic logos, like the ones shown here—some inspired by tips in Before & After—are both timeless and classy. In this column, you’ll learn tips for making one yourself, which programs to use, and how to make one in a word processor.

Design tips

No matter which program you use to make your logo, or what colors you decide to use (these examples are black for the sake of simplicity), the following design guidelines will put you on the path to success:

The standard iOS Messages app—you know, the app you use daily for trading all those text messages, photos, and videos—can do much more than you might think. Not only can you forward any text messages you receive, you can also find out when a given message was sent or received, shush an annoying group thread, and sync Messages between your iOS device and your Mac.

Forward a message

To forward a message, tap and hold it, then select More, and tap the forward arrow in the bottom-right.

With tens of thousands of fonts in circulation, it’s tough to identify a specific font from memory, when you see it. Fortunately, you don’t have to—there are free websites, and an iOS app, that can identify font samples for you on the fly. The process is easy and a whole lot of fun.

From a printed sample

No matter which resource you use, font identification from a printed sample works the same way: you scan or take a photo of some text, upload it, and then the resource tries to guess the characters in the photo. After the characters are correctly identified, the resource tries to find the font.

For the best results, use a clean, straight image of the example text. Ideally, find a large printed example of the font and then scan it—18 point text or larger works best, because the edges of the characters will be more accurate. If you don’t have a scanner, take a careful snapshot with your smartphone or camera. Be sure to hold your camera so the text isn’t skewed horizontally or vertically. If that’s not possible, open the photo in an image editor and use its tools to straighten the example.

Writer Chris Breen is looking at a big change and has something to say. He writes:

After decades of offering advice to Apple users in the pages of MacUser and then Macworld, I‘m making a career change and heading off to a fruit-flavored tech company sandwiched between Santa Clara and Sunnyvale. As this will be my last word from Mac 911, is there anything I can say to put this whole “Ack, my tech isn‘t working!” thing into perspective?

I’ve found these three broad principles to be the most helpful.

Don’t panic.

Puzzle it out.

Have faith.

Don’t panic

One of the dumbest brilliances I ever heard was this gem from a woman who‘d had one highball too many:

Not too long ago using Microsoft’s Office apps on any iOS device was nothing more than a far-fetched dream. Then the team in Redmond rocked the iOS world by releasing its Office suite for the iPad. There was a glaring issue with it, however, in the fact you could only view documents for free. To edit existing documents or create new ones, you needed to shell out for an Office 365 account.

Then in November, Microsoft surprised everyone once again by releasing an update that made editing documents part of the free set of features. Since then, I’ve spent plenty of time kicking the tires of the suite on my iPad and iPhone, and learned some helpful tips for boosting your mobile productivity.

If you like watching foreign movies, you may find that, when seeking out new films, you can only get the movie you want in a version without subtitles. This is great if you’re bi- or multi-lingual, but if not, you really need to know what the actors are saying.

In this article, I’m going to look at subtitles: how you can play them in movies that already contain them, how you can add them to movies you rip from DVDs, and how you can create your own subtitles or captions.

Switch languages with iTunes Store movies

Some movies you buy in the iTunes Store come with multiple language tracks and subtitles. You can access these in iTunes by starting to play a movie and then clicking the speech balloon button. From this menu, select the audio or subtitles language (or closed captioning) you want. You can also use iTunes’ Controls > Audio & Subtitles command.